Читать книгу The Valley of Fear - Артур Конан Дойл, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 11

The Valley of Fear is the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel, serialized in The Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. Some years before its publication, Arthur Conan Doyle met a man named William Pinkerton on a transatlantic voyage, and he provided the inspiration for the plot.

In the late 1870s Pinkerton was running a private investigation company in the United States, The Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The company was contracted by the government to infiltrate a rebel union, the Molly Maguires, in the Pennsylvanian anthracite coal-mining district, who were protesting about the poor conditions and wages of the mining families.

An undercover Pinkerton agent, James McParland, fed information about the Molly Maguires’ activity, which led to some of them being arrested and executed. William Pinkerton’s version of the story was that the Molly Maguires were criminals who deserved their punishment; McParland’s was that Pinkerton and the government were corrupt and had framed the Molly Maguires to keep the mine owners happy, suggesting that agents posing as the Molly Maguires had carried out various acts of sabotage – even murder – to set them up.

The Valley of Fear features arch-criminal Professor Moriarty, who was also based on a real character, Adam Worth, a German-born American. Worth was known as ‘the Napoleon of Crime’, thanks to his skill at organizing heists and moving on: New York, Liverpool, Paris, London and finally Liège, where he was eventually caught by the police in 1892. His capture was newsworthy, and excited the imagination of Conan Doyle. Holmes and Moriarty are alter egos, intellectual equals and sparring partners, yet fall on different sides of the law. Together they form the one of the best-known rivalries in literature.